Bremer has destroyed my country

Even the pro-US manager of Iraq's Pepsi plant feels betrayed by an
occupation which has spawned fear, hatred and chaos

Naomi Klein in Baghdad
Saturday April 3, 2004
The Guardian

'Do you have any rooms?" we ask the hotelier. She looks us over,
dwelling on my travel partner's bald, white head. "No," she replies.

We try not to notice that there are 60 room keys in pigeonholes behind
her desk - the place is empty.

"Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?"

She hesitates. "Ahh ... No."

We return to our current hotel - the one we want to leave because
there are bets on when it is going to get hit - and flick on the TV:
the BBC is showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the
September 11 commission, and a couple of pundits are arguing about
whether invading Iraq has made America safer.

They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where the US
occupation has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense that
it now extends not only to US troops, occupation officials and their
contractors but also to foreign journalists, aid workers, their
translators and pretty much anyone else associated with the
Americans. Which is why we couldn't begrudge the hotelier her
decision: if you want to survive in Iraq, it's wise to stay the hell
away from people who look like us. (We thought about explaining that
we were Canadians, but all the American reporters are sporting the
maple leaf - that is, when they aren't trying to disappear behind
their newly purchased headscarves.)

The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, hasn't started wearing a hijab
yet, and is instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism with his
usual foresight. Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs like
Baghdad Now, filled with fawning articles about how Americans are
teaching Iraqis about press freedom. "I never thought before that the
coalition could do a great thing for the Iraqi people," one trainee is
quoted as saying. "Now I can see it on my eyes that they are doing
good things for my country and the accomplishment they made.I wish my
people can see that, the way I see it."

Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another version of press
freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper run by
supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shia cleric has been
preaching that Americansare behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and
condemning the interim constitution as a "terrorist law." So far,
al-Sadr has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed
resistance, but many here are predicting that closing down the
newspaper - a nonviolent means of resisting the occupation - was just
the push he needed. But then, recruiting for the resistance has always
beena specialty of the presidential envoy to Iraq: Bremer's first act
after being tapped by Bush was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse
to give them their rightful pensions, but allow them to hold on to
their weapons - in case they needed them later.

While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's office,
I found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism,
the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will
start producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture:
Pepsi-Cola. I figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing
to defend the Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad
Soft Drinks Company's managing director. I was wrong.

"All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremer," Khamis told me,
flanked by a line-up of 30 Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He didn't listen
to Iraqis. He doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed the
country and tried to rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos."

These are words you would expect to hear from religious extremists or
Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's not just
that his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US
multinational in Iraq's new "free market". It's also that few Iraqis
supported the war more staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam
executed both his brothers and Khamis was forced to resign as managing
director of the bottling plant in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday
threatened his life. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, "you can't
imagine how much relief we felt", he says.

After the Ba'athist plant manager was forced out, Khamis returned to
his old job. "There is a risk doing business with the Americans," he
says. Several months ago, two detonators were discovered in front of
the factory gates. And Khamis is still shaken from an attempted
assassination three weeks ago. He was on his way to work when he was
carjacked and shot at, and there was no doubt that this was a targeted
attack; one of the assailants was heard asking another, "Did you kill
the manager?"

Khamis used to be happy to defend his pro-US position, even if it
meant arguing with friends. But one year after the invasion, many of
his neighbours in the industrial park have gone out of business. "I
don't know what to say tomy friends anymore," he says. "It's chaos."

His list of grievances against the occupation is long: corruption in
the awarding of reconstruction contracts, the failure to stop the
looting; the failure to secure Iraq's borders - both from foreign
terrorists and from unregulated foreign imports. Iraqi companies,
still suffering from the sanctions and the looting, have been unable
to compete.

Most of all, Khamis is worried about how these policies have fed the
country's unemployment crisis, creating far too many desperate
people. He also notes that Iraqi police officers are paid less than
half what he pays his assembly line workers, "which is not enough to
survive"., The normally soft-spoken Khamis becomes enraged when
talking about the man in charge of "rebuilding" Iraq. "Paul Bremer
has caused more damage than the war, because the bombs can damage a
building but if you damage people there is no hope."

I have gone to the mosques and street demonstrations and listened to
Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters shout "Death to America, Death to the
Jews", and it is indeed chilling. But it is the profound sense of
disappointment and betrayal expressed by a pro-US businessman running
a Pepsi plant that attests to the depths of the US-created disaster
here. "I'm disappointed, not because I hate the Americans," Khamis
tells me, "but because I like them. And when you love someone and they
hurt you, it hurts even more."

When we leave the bottling plant in late afternoon, the streets of
US-occupied Baghdad are filled with al-Sadr supporters vowing bloody
revenge for the attack on their newspaper. A spokesperson for Bremer
is defending the decision on the grounds that the paper "was making
people think we were out to get them".

A growing number of Iraqis are certainly under that impression, but it
has far less to do with an inflammatory newspaper than with the
inflammatory actions of the US occupation authority. As the June 30
"handover" approaches, Bremer has unveiled a slew of new tricks to
hold on to power long after "sovereignty" has been declared.

Some recent highlights. At the end of March, building on his Order 39
of last September, Bremer passed yet another law further opening up
Iraq's economy to foreign ownership, a law that Iraq's next government
is prohibited from changing under the terms of the interim
constitution. Bremer also announcedthe establishment of several
independent regulators, which will drastically reduce the power of
Iraqi government ministries. For instance, the Financial Times reports
that "officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority said the
regulator would prevent communications minister Haider al-Abadi, a
thorn in the side of the coalition, from carrying out his threat to
cancel licences the coalition awarded to foreign-managed consortia to
operate three mobile networks and the national broadcaster."

The CPA has also confirmed that after June 30, the $18.4bn that the US
government is spending on reconstruction will be administered by its
embassy in Iraq. The money will be spent over five years and will
fundamentally redesign Iraq's most basic infrastructure, including its
electricity, water, oil and communications sectors, as well as its
courts and police. Iraq's future governments will have no say in the
construction of these core sectors of Iraqi society. Retired rear
admiral David Nash, who heads the Project Management Office, which
administers the funds, describes the $18.4bn as "a gift from the
American people to the people of Iraq".

He appears to have forgotten the part about gifts being something you
actually give up. And in the same eventful week, US engineers began
construction on 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq, capable of housing the
110,000 soldiers who will be posted here for at least two more
years. Even though the bases are being built with no mandate from an
Iraqi government, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of
operations in Iraq, called them "a blueprint for how we could operate
in the Middle East".

The US occupation authority has also found a sneaky way to maintain
control over Iraq's armed forces. Bremer has issued an executive order
stating that even after the interim Iraqi government has been
established, the Iraqi army will answer to US commander Lt General
Ricardo Sanchez. In order to pull this off, Washington is relying on a
legalistic reading of a clause in UN security council resolution 1511,
which puts US forces in charge of Iraq's security until "the
completion of the political process" in Iraq. Since the "political
process" in Iraq is never-ending, so it seems is US military control.

In the same flurry of activity, the CPA announced that it would put
further constraints on the Iraqi military by appointing a national
security adviserfor Iraq. This US appointee would have powers
equivalent to those held by Condoleezza Rice and will stay in office
for a five-year term, long after Iraq is scheduled to have made the
transition to a democratically elected government.

There is one piece of this country, though, that the US government is
happy to cede to the people of Iraq: the hospitals. On March 27 Bremer
announced that he had withdrawn the senior US advisers from Iraq's
health ministry, making it the first sector to achieve "full
authority" in the US occupation.

Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling picture of what
a "free Iraq" will look like: the United States will maintain its
military and corporate presence through 14 enduring military bases and
the largest US embassy in the world. It will hold on to authority over
Iraq's armed forces, its security and economic policy and the design
of its core infrastructure - but the Iraqis can deal with their
decrepit hospitals all by themselves, complete with their chronic drug
shortages and lack of the most basic sanitation capacity. (The US
health and human services secretary, Tommy Thompson, revealed just how
low a priority this was when he commented that Iraq's hospitals would
be fixed if the Iraqis "just washed their hands and cleaned the crap
off the walls".)

On nights when there are no nearby explosions, we hang out at the
hotel, jumping at the sound of car doors slamming. Sometimes we flick
on the news and eavesdrop on a faraway debate about whether invading
Iraq has made Americans safer.

Few seem interested in the question of whether the invasion has made
Iraqis feel safer, which is too bad because the questions are
intimately related. As Khamis says: "It's not the war that caused the
hatred. It's what they did after. What they are doing now."

· A version of this article first appeared in the Nation

www.nologo.org